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Comment by _kxbd | Hacker News Reader

The future of anti-cheat is machine learning specific to the game. CS:GO already does this, where it used the Overwatch community review program to train it, and it can now automatically ban some cheaters.

I don't think it's a viable model because players are willing to do it for free, as CS:GO's Overwatch shows.

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Valve also put a significant amount of work into this system. Asking every game developer to build that system for their game seems like alot to ask- Especially when they can just drop in a few lines of code // third party software package and have cheating 'handled'.

'Not invented here' is a blessing and a curse.

Public relations for a startup like this would be hard to manage. I can already see the front page Reddit post with 4,000 upvotes on the game's subreddit asking why they lost $400 worth of items because one of the outsourced employees being paid $3/hour illegitimately banned them. Easy target to blame a company like this.

Cheater effort and quantity scales roughly with game revenue and popularity. So the first tier of games, the most popular and long-term ones, like League of Legends, CS:GO, Overwatch, maybe Valorant, Apex Legends, Fortnite, can afford machine learning. The next tier down can afford to implement community review programs, where players earn in-game rewards and the satisfaction of improving game experience.

To be fair, this happens regardless, every day. Nobody believes anyone suspected of cheating, ever. And I mean ever. Just go look at the steam forums and the thousands of "i was falsely banned posts". If what you are saying was true, we would have seen this already happen for steam on reddit every day, which it doesnt.

Also, thats not to say you cant have a second and third tier of support to escalate your case to if you think you were wrongly banned, which wouldnt go to the grunts.

How do you know if someone is lying on a virtual forum? All of the cheaters that got rightfully banned have just as much reason to write the same forum posts as those who were wrongly banned. That combined with the fact that the large majority of people (probably >99%) who don't cheat never get wrongfully VAC banned makes it hard to believe that the system made a mistake.

This is because most of the cheating bans currently are not human reviewed, it's technical evidence. Closest to this issue I can remember is that some pro CS:GO player was banned by the Overwatch program a few years ago and a fuss was made until it got fixed.

Trying to review a replay to determine if a player is using wallhacks? This would take intimate knowledge of every game the SaaS reviews.

Maybe this can work out and I'll be like the one 2007 HN comment about Dropbox, but it takes an average of maybe 5-10 minutes per case to review if you're not being super thorough. It could be an open platform where players can sign up, but at that point I think game developers would just implement it in-house. The harder part of this technically is the replay functionality in the first place, which they'd have to do anyway.

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